


Baby, Sometimes

by downtheroadandupthehill



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Rule 63, fluffy beyond belief, queer lady Enjolras, trans lady Grantaire, warning for gender dysphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:30:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtheroadandupthehill/pseuds/downtheroadandupthehill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But at home, she tiptoes around Enjolras like she’s afraid she’ll bite her head off at any moment, and when Enjolras says as much, Grantaire doesn’t stifle her laughter.</p>
<p>“But won’t you?” And it’s asked with a mixture of mirth and confusion, but there’s warmth there, too.</p>
<p>She reaches out, brushes back a section of wavy blonde hair that had slipped from Enjolras’s neat bun—where she keeps her writing utensils, more often than not—and tucks it back behind her ear.</p>
<p>“I can be a little more in your way then, if that’s what you want.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby, Sometimes

Enjolras loves her friends, she does, even if she’s bad at showing it. She loves all of them, too, even the one or two who are usually too loud and drunk and sarcastic for her liking. Her love for her friends is how Grantaire ends up in permanent residence on her couch, and why Enjolras does not seem to mind (not too much, anyway, at least most of the time.)

It started with a teary phone call at six in the evening from a sober Grantaire—a sober Grantaire by six p.m. was a rare occurrence, and so Enjolras knew something was wrong even before she heard the choked-off sobs arising from the back of her throat. Eviction—Grantaire’s parents had stopped helping her to pay her rent, her tuition, her everything, and now her apartment was the first thing she was losing. A few paintings sold here and there, along with her job making overpriced lattes at the local hipster cafe, were not nearly enough to keep her under a roof or in school, not to mention paying for hormone therapy.

“And I’ll be fucking homeless before I go off of that,” she’d said, weeks later, and smirked like it was some kind of joke.

The hormone therapy was the problem in the first place, it seemed, once Grantaire had stopped crying for long enough to speak again. That was why her parents were cutting her off, because they missed the son that they’d never really had, and couldn’t seem to love their daughter instead. At that, Enjolras wanted to drive down to the shitty, closed-minded town Grantaire had come from, and hurl pamphlets and insults at her parents’ faces and rocks at their windows. On the phone she’d begun to rail, until she realized that that was not exactly helping.

Grantaire showed up at her door with a bottle of vodka in her hand and a purple duffel bag slung over her shoulder, packed full of clothes and shoes and art supplies.

Enjolras had seen the state of Grantaire’s old place—covered in paint and unfinished canvases, half-eaten boxes of take-out—the only thing it seemed like she was capable of finishing being bottles of booze—and she dreaded what the girl would do to her living room. But Grantaire keeps her things in small, neat piles shoved underneath the couch, like a secret, and even her bathroom necessities like shampoo and conditioner and a toothbrush she keeps in a ziplock bag with the rest of her stuff, even though Enjolras cleared off a shelf in the cabinet for her.

“I don’t want to take up your space,” she says, in a small voice. But Grantaire never does anything small, and Enjolras feels a brief tug of concern.  ”I’ll be out in a few days, once I figure something out.”

She has to drop courses that she can’t pay for, only staying enrolled in her watercolors class “because without an excuse to make myself do art, I’ll really go crazy.” It gives her more time to pick up extra shifts at the cafe, to pay for the class and food and therapy, though rent for a place seems harder to come by. Enjolras even enlists Combeferre to help her crunch the numbers for a proper budget, because math is neither her or Grantaire’s strong suit. In the end, a proper apartment goes from hard to impossible, at least on this side of the city, and she winces as Grantaire began to pursue other, sketchier listings in the newspaper.

“Why don’t you just move in with me?” Enjolras hears herself say.

Grantaire gapes at her, while Combeferre only raises her eyebrows.

“I don’t have a roommate, and you said my sofa is comfortable. You haven’t been too much of a terror this week, either.” Enjolras shrugs. “So why not?”

…..

_You don’t care about anything._

Well, apparently Enjolras had been wrong about that one.

Grantaire does seem to care about one thing, specifically, staying out of Enjolras’s way. She spends long nights out at the bars, doesn’t stumble home until three in the morning because she says she doesn’t want to distract Enjolras from her schoolwork. She still won’t use the bathroom shelf that Enjolras cleared off for her, and Enjolras is close to insisting very loudly that she ought to finally use it. She has no idea where Grantaire does her painting, but it isn’t here.

When they’re out together or at the group’s regular meetings in the upstairs of the Musain, Grantaire is the same old Grantaire, cynical barbs aimed at every ideal that falls from Enjolras’s lips.

“Oh great, another rally. I’m sure when we all get arrested again it will rid the world of oppression for good.”

“Why fucking bother?”

“And what will marriage equality really do to improve the shitty state of this country. Will it deter assholes from beating people to death in alleyways?”

(That last one had thrown Enjolras off, just a bit, because she hated admitting when Grantaire was perhaps right for once.)

But at home, she tiptoes around Enjolras like she’s afraid she’ll bite her head off at any moment, and when Enjolras says as much, Grantaire doesn’t stifle her laughter.

“But won’t you?” And it’s asked with a mixture of mirth and confusion, but there’s warmth there, too.

She reaches out, brushes back a section of wavy blonde hair that had slipped from Enjolras’s neat bun—where she keeps her writing utensils, more often than not—and tucks it back behind her ear.

“I can be a little more in your way then, if that’s what you want.”

…..

Grantaire begins to grow her hair long, and in six months it goes from short curls to pretty ringlets past her shoulders. Enjolras catches her smiling at herself for the first time in the bathroom mirror when they get ready in the morning, Enjolras brushing her teeth and Grantaire combing her shower-wet hair. She always wears it loose.

The silence between them used to be more awkward, sometimes even angry.

One night at the Musain, Jehan has flowers, and that’s nothing new until she begins to braid them into Grantaire’s hair, finishing off the plait with a violet ribbon. Down Grantaire’s neck and between her shoulder blades, a neat weaving together of her hair, studded with yellow daffodils that look even brighter against black. Grantaire smiles again, this time for longer than before.

She comes home later that night, smelling like rum and cigarettes. (She’s persisted in smoking, despite Joly’s constant warnings and nervous flutterings about the dangers of it combined with estrogen therapy—though Grantaire swears she’s at least cut back.)

Enjolras is curled on the couch already, a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea open and almost finished in her lap. Grantaire collapses into a sprawl on the floor in front of her, rests her head back against Enjolras’ knees.

“Can you help me undo this? It’s just going to turn into a giant knot if I even try.”

Enjolras sighs, pretends it’s a chore, pretends her homework is more important, but gets her fingers tangled in it anyways. She unties the ribbon and laces it around her own slim ankle, for safekeeping, works to untwist winding sections of Grantaire’s hair. Grantaire sighs then, with something like contentment, and closes her eyes.

They find daffodils around the apartment for the next week, and Enjolras only pretends to be annoyed.

…..

She’s generally good at expressing her feelings. Yelling at protests, writing furious editorials, growling at whatever politician is fucking up on the news this time—Enjolras is good at that. Eloquent and persuasive, too, Combeferre tells her, and she’s only slightly vain about it.

Which is why this shouldn’t be so difficult.

She should tell it to her face, but when she gets the opportunity the words stumble over her usually deft tongue and slip out as “what do you want for dinner” or “can’t you turn the volume down.”

Or maybe write them in scented magic markers across the smooth expanse of forearms and hips and in between shoulder blades and the joints of fingers.

(Suddenly Enjolras has become Jehan and she isn’t even sure how the hell this happened, but it has, and suddenly she spends too much time blushing at one thing and nothing in particular.)

Enjolras has two glasses of wine at the Musain and she rarely drinks anything so everything feels hazy and just a hint of unbalanced. Grantaire gets her home with an arm around her shoulders and a mumbled comment about how much she loves the strawberry scent of Enjolras’ shampoo—and there, Enjolras is blushing again, why is she doing that?

Enjolras shimmies out of her dress and crawls beneath her sheets while Grantaire flops onto the couch—from her bedroom, Enjolras can hear the familiar slouch of springs—and turns on the television. Infomercials, by the sound of them. Grantaire can’t fall asleep to silence.

In the dark, Enjolras plugs her phone into its charger, sets her alarm for seven in the morning, and hesitates.

_I know I am just giving you another thing to argue with me about, but I think you’re beautiful_ , she taps out with her thumbs, and presses send before she can rethink this decision.

A minute later, over the sound of the television, she thinks she hears a snort from Grantaire out on the couch.

…..

Enjolras squirms in Grantaire’s lap, back arching and her skirt riding up around her waist as she grinds down furiously on Grantaire’s thigh, seeking any delicious friction that she can against the fabric of her jeans.

Those jeans, those fucking too-tight jeans that Grantaire wears way too much, because she must’ve known what they did to Enjolras, she had to have known that Enjolras would jump her one day over those fucking jeans that hugged her ass and her budding hips like new lovers. Enjolras always catches herself staring, which she rarely does otherwise (or so she tells herself) and she wonders if Grantaire could feel her eyes on her the way Enjolras can always feel Grantaire’s eyes on her.

Grantaire’s eyes are on her now, blue and intense, while Enjolras fists her hands into the other girl’s hair and keeps Grantaire’s mouth, wet and hot, against her breast, licking and nipping and sucking and Enjolras never wants her to stop, and Grantaire keeps staring up at her like Enjolras is some sort of goddess in secret ecstasy and she has to savor the sight before she is blinded for her presumption.

She feels fingertips graze along the back of her knee and higher, to trace along the elastic of her underwear and Enjolras shudders in anticipation, bucks her hips as Grantaire brushes her thumb over where Enjolras needs it most. A whine builds in the back of her throat when Grantaire does it again, and when Grantaire chuckles, her teeth scrape against Enjolras’s nipple and Enjolras can only gasp into the other girl’s collarbone.

“I wish you could see how obscene you look right now,” Grantaire murmurs, and licks her lips.

“All your fault,” Enjolras barely manages to force out, and bites down into Grantaire’s shoulder when the girl finally slips a finger, two fingers, underneath the cotton and begins to touch her with purpose.

“I want to make you come,” Grantaire says, and her breath is hot in Enjolras’s ear, and there’s just a hint of uncertainty there, a this is okay, right?

In reply, Enjolras rocks her hips more forcefully against Grantaire’s fingers, with a keening whisper of “Please.”

…..

Enjolras wants to make Grantaire moan, too, make her squirm with want until she comes apart at the cusp of Enjolras’s fingertips. One night, her hand hovers over the drawstring of Grantaire’s sweatpants—they’d dressed for bed, kissed sweetly, and Grantaire had chased her underneath the comforter. Now, Grantaire shifts nervously from where she is hovering above Enjolras, a brief look of panic crossing her face that strikes Enjolras breathless with shame.

Her hand falls back down to rest at her side. She is awful at apologies, but this  _matters_.

“I’m sorry.”

Grantaire nods in acceptance, but she’s still staring too hard at her own hand, where it is splayed across Enjolras’s ribs. She sinks down onto Enjolras, until their bodies are together and imperfectly aligned. Forehead to forehead, and Enjolras almost winces at the apology in Grantaire’s voice, Grantaire says, “Just not that. Getting to touch  _you_  is enough for me, I promise.”

Enjolras exhales, realizes she’d been holding her breath, begins to comb her fingers through Grantaire’s hair and hope it’s comforting.

She’s happy with what they have, anyway, and is able to content herself with more tender movements—pressing her lips against her cheek, sliding her hands into Grantaire’s back pockets—Enjolras has never realized before now just how tactile she is, hadn’t learned this about herself until now, how much she likes to touch and be touched. Even if Enjolras did not enjoy it so much, the way Grantaire’s face alights at every single gesture would make them worth it.

They fight, of course—they’ve always fought, and that won’t stop simply because they curl up in each other’s arms every night in a bed they’ve come to share. Grantaire tries to drink less and sometimes fails, while Enjolras is left pacing from room to room, trying not to scream and tearing at her own hair in frustration. Sometimes she does scream, and Grantaire screams back, especially when Enjolras gets lost in a project, a paper, a protest, and Grantaire wonders what she’s done wrong.

They fight, and they always make up, after a few minutes or hours or even days, but they always make up.

Grantaire laces her fingers with Enjolras’s, presses a kiss to the center of her palm. In return, Enjolras drags Grantaire’s face to hers in a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss, because she doesn’t want to be revered, she wants to be loved (and that’s what Grantaire wants too, Enjolras knows, even if she’s too afraid to say the words aloud) and they just might find that with one another.


End file.
